Humans have a cognitive ability that no other animal seems to have. We can mentally time-travel. At will, we can think back to the past, reimagining our first day at college or eating a meal last week. Then, just as rapidly, we can switch to picturing the future, imagining our next holiday or drinking a cup of tea in an hour’s time.

This isn’t about knowing something has happened, or will happen, but experiencing it in our minds. It’s the difference between knowing that when summer comes, the weather will be warmer, and imagining yourself sitting in the sunshine next summer, feeling the heat on your skin.

The experimental psychologist Endel Tulving described mental time-travel as part of autonoetic consciousness – the sense we have of ourselves as persisting across time. We can both re-experience and pre-experience events.

If you are meeting some friends for lunch, your prospective memory reminds you to turn up on the right day, but you can also picture yourself finding a table, reading the menu and ordering your food. This is different from actively planning.

This is one of the skills unique to humans, according to the Thomas Suddendorf, author of The Gap: The Science Of What Separates Us From Other Animals, who is based at the University of Queensland.

The ability to time-travel mentally has allowed us to imagine different futures and to produce the complex world we live in today. By recombining old memories, we are able to project ourselves forward in time, giving us endless combinations from which to select the most plausible possibilities.

Like a remix, utilising these memories allows us to preview future events in a window in the mind. This is key to the extraordinary ability of humans to adapt to their environments.

Suddendorf says this is one of the factors that makes us unique. “We can do nested scenario building, that is we have an open-ended capacity to imagine alternative situations, to reflect upon them and to embed them into larger narratives. It’s a tremendously powerful skill. We can imagine situations like what we’re going to do tomorrow, next week, where we’re going to have a holiday, what career path to pursue, and we can imagine alternative versions of those. And we can evaluate each of them in terms of their likelihood and desirability.”

This allows us to shape the future to our own design and to seek opportunities and avoid threats before they emerge.

Other animals can’t do this in the same way. Suddendorf says psychologists believe that your dog doesn’t lie by the fire reminiscing about its favourite walks and hoping to return to that special field where they once found a dead rabbit.

Babies are also forced to live in the here and now, unable to escape mentally into the future. It is not until the age of three or four that they begin to be able to imagine a future where they might feel differently, where they can anticipate or fear events.

In one experiment only a third of three-year-olds could give a plausible answer as to what they might do the next day, but within a year or two their sense of the future has developed to the extent that two-thirds of them can do it.

This suggests that small children have an extreme form of the empathy gap we can all experience on occasion which leaves us unable to imagine that we might feel differently in the future. When I packed my suitcase on a dreary November day in London to go to Sydney where I knew temperatures were high, I still couldn’t resist packing a jumper and puffer jacket. It was impossible to imagine that I wouldn’t need them.

Of course, neither garment left my suitcase.

But sometimes our ability to time-travel in our minds brings us distress. Helen Christensen, chief scientist at the Black Dog Institute in Sydney, told the audience at the World-Changing Ideas Summit “the capacity of imagination means that sometimes people do ruminate about the future and also looking backwards people can be traumatised, reliving their experiences, which can be incredibly upsetting and can interfere with happy functioning”.

But she hopes that technology can come to the rescue. Her team have been experimenting with using techniques from cognitive behavioural therapy online and via apps. Fifteen years ago they developed Mood Gym, an online course of cognitive behavioural therapy that has since been used in more than 200 countries around the world. The found the anonymity of this approach means they can reach people who don’t want to come forward and talk to a real life therapist.

Now they’re looking to social media to try to identify people who might benefit from such a course. Using machine learning and artificial intelligence they’re hoping to pick up the signals young people are giving out when they post on social media.

“We’re doing a large number of experiments where we’re trying to look at the content and structure of language to see whether that will give us clues as to a particular problem. For example, were finding that bipolar communities often talk about the medication they’re taking. Groups that hang together online because of self-harm are often angry. We find that depressed people use more personal pronouns.”

If they can identify people at risk, then the question is what to do with that information and how to intervene. They might be able to place adverts for online CBT to appear in social media if particular keywords or search items are used, in a similar way to marketing companies who already personalise adverts.

“It sounds Big Brotherish, but on the other hand we have already developed a large number of apps and online programmes that are effective in reducing suicide risk, anxiety and depression. So we have the digital tools. It’s a question of how can we do the research involving young people and others to identify the best way in which to deliver this information and help to them.”

The skill of mental time travel has on the whole served us well, but in the future might we evolve to avoid these mental health difficulties? Will depression always be with us? Suddendorf says he almost hopes so.

“At least in their mild forms, depression and anxiety are part of our mental repertoire for how we deal with the world we’ve developed. We get depressed when we pursue options that are not successful. That motivates us to withdraw from that situation or it signals to others that we might need help.

“Anxiety is useful in that when we simulate future events we have an emotional reaction that makes us feel anxious. That motivates us in the here and now to do something about that event – to run away or to prepare. That makes us better able to cope with a future event. So these mild versions might be functional. Of course I hope that more serious clinical disorders can be dealt with.”

SAN FRANCISCO — An automated army of pro-Donald J. Trump chatbots overwhelmed similar programs supporting Hillary Clinton five to one in the days leading up to the presidential election, according to a report published Thursday by researchers at Oxford University.

The chatbots — basic software programs with a bit of artificial intelligence and rudimentary communication skills — would send messages on Twitter based on a topic, usually defined on the social network by a word preceded by a hashtag symbol, like #Clinton.

Their purpose: to rant, confuse people on facts, or simply muddy discussions, said Philip N. Howard, a sociologist at the Oxford Internet Institute and one of the authors of the report. If you were looking for a real debate of the issues, you weren’t going to find it with a chatbot.

“They’re yelling fools,” Dr. Howard said. “And a lot of what they pass around is false news.”

The role fake news played in the presidential election has become a sore point for the technology industry, particularly Google, Twitter and Facebook. On Monday, Google said it would ban websites that peddle fake news from using its online advertising service. Facebook also updated the language in its Facebook Audience Network policy, which already says it will not display ads in sites that show misleading or illegal content, to include fake news sites.

In some cases, the bots would post embarrassing photos, make references to the Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry into Mrs. Clinton’s private email server, or produce false statements, for instance, that Mrs. Clinton was about to go to jail or was already in jail.

“The use of automated accounts was deliberate and strategic throughout the election,” the researchers wrote in the report, published by the Project on Algorithms, Computational Propaganda and Digital Politics at Oxford.

Because the chatbots were almost entirely anonymous and were frequently bought in secret from companies or individual programmers, it was not possible to directly link the activity to either campaign, except for a handful of “joke” bots created by Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, they noted.

However, there was evidence that the mystery chatbots were part of an organized effort.

“There does seem to be strategy behind the bots,” Dr. Howard said. “By the third debate, Trump bots were launching into their activity early and we noticed that automated accounts were actually colonizing Clinton hashtags.”

A hashtag is used to indicate a Twitter post’s topic. By adopting hashtags relating to Mrs. Clinton, the opposition bots were most likely able to wiggle their way into an online conversation among Clinton supporters.

After the election, the bot traffic declined rapidly, with the exception of some pro-Trump programs that gloated, “We won and you lost,” Dr. Howard said.

Trump campaign officials did not respond to requests for comment. Twitter executives argued that more people would not follow the programs and so they would be picked up only by those who looked for particular hashtags.

“Anyone who claims that automated spam accounts that tweeted about the U.S. election had an effect on voters’ opinions or influenced the national Twitter conversation clearly underestimates voters and fails to understand how Twitter works,” said Nick Pacilio, a Twitter spokesman.

The researchers based their study on a collection of about 19.4 million Twitter posts gathered in the first nine days of November. They selected tweets based on hashtags identifying certain subjects and identified automated posting by finding accounts that post at least 50 times a day.

“For example, the top 20 accounts, which were mostly bots and highly automated accounts, averaged over 1,300 tweets a day and they generated more than 234,000 tweets,” the researchers noted. “The top 100 accounts, which still used high levels of automation, generated around 450,000 tweets at an average rate of 500 tweets per day.”

The Oxford researchers had previously reported that political chatbots had played a role in shaping the political landscape that led to Britain’s “Brexit” vote.

The researchers have coined the term “computational propaganda” to describe the explosion of deceptive social media campaigns on services like Facebook and Twitter.

In a previous research paper, Dr. Howard and Bence Kollanyi, a researcher at Corvinus University of Budapest, described how political chatbots had a “small but strategic role” in shaping the online conversation during the run-up to the Brexit referendum.

The bot managers seem to repurpose the programs as well. During the British campaign, they discovered that a family of bots that had been tweeting around Israeli-Palestinian issues for three or four years had suddenly become pro-Brexit. After the vote, the bots returned to their original issue.

In the case of the American election, the researchers noted that “highly automated accounts — the accounts that tweeted 450 or more times with a related hashtag and user mention during the data collection period — generated close to 18 percent of all Twitter traffic about the presidential election.”

They also noted that bots tend to circulate negative news much more effectively than positive reports.

One of the consequences of the intense social media campaigns will be a rise in what social scientists call “selective affinity.”

“Clinton supporters will cut the Trump supporters out of their network, and Trump supporters will do the same,” Dr. Howard said. “The polarization of the election is going to make this stuff worse as we self-groom our news networks.”

Alphabet unit Google has been given an extra week to formally respond to allegations by the European Commission that it was blocking rivals in online search advertising, a move likely to delay a regulatory decision on the case until next year.

The deadline has been extended to Nov. 3 from Oct. 26, European Commission spokesman Ricardo Cardoso said, making it the second extension.

"Google asked for additional time to review the documents in the case file. In line with normal practice, the commission analyzed the reasons for the request and granted an extension allowing Google to fully exercise its rights of defense," he said in an email.

The charge was made against Google in July, the third antitrust case to be raised by the EU against the world's most popular internet search engine and accusing it of having abused its market power in the placement of search advertising on third-party websites.

The case concerns Google's AdSense for Search product whereby websites such as online retailers, telecoms operators and newspapers can install a customized search engine on their site which generates revenue from having relevant ads appear on the search results page.

Deadlines for Google to respond to the first charge that it favors its own shopping service over those of rivals and a second accusation that it abuses the dominance of its Android operating system for phones to squeeze out rivals remain unchanged at Nov. 7 and Oct. 31 respectively.

Both deadlines have been extended several times. Google has previously denied any wrongdoing.

Technology giants IBM Corp, Google and seven others have joined hands to launch an open specification that can boost datacenter server performance by up to ten times, to take on Intel Corp.

The new standard, called Open Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (OpenCAPI), is an open forum to provide a high bandwidth, low latency open interface design specification.

The open interface will help corporate and cloud data centers to speed up big data, machine learning, analytics and other emerging workloads.

The consortium plans to make the OpenCAPI specification available to the public before the end of the year and expects servers and related products based on the new standard in the second half of 2017, it said in a statement.

Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, is known to protect its server technologies and has chosen to sit out of the new consortium. In the past also, it had stayed away from prominent open standards technology groups such as CCIX and Gen-Z.

"As artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced analytics become the price of doing business in today's digital era, huge volumes of data are now the norm," Doug Balog, general manager for IBM Power, told Reuters.

"It's clear that today's datacenters can no longer rely on one company alone to drive innovation," Balog said.

Does anxiety keep getting in the way of you making connections with the people you’d like to spend more time with? Maybe you’ve just met someone, but are worried that your anxiety will ruin it all. People with anxiety can be highly self-critical, tend to overestimate the likelihood that something negative will happen, and often feel that others are judging them.

Sometimes, just thinking about a social situation can induce panic attacks, which are sudden spikes of intense anxiety that peak within a few minutes and feel like you’re about to have a heart attack, lose control, or go mad. During social situations, people with anxiety might feel short of breath and experience dizziness, sweating, blushing, stuttering, and an upset stomach.

Many people are affected by anxiety. In fact, one in 14 people around the world will have an anxiety disorder at any given time, with women and young people being most affected. But it is possible to overcome anxiety and date successfully. Here are some top scientific tips.

Don’t focus on the worst

People with anxiety tend to worry about what might go wrong in a situation and fear that they will do or say something to embarrass themselves. These thoughts not only produce a highly negative mental state characterised by dread and helplessness, but also harmful physiological body changes, such as higher secretion of stress hormones.

Being in such a negative state doesn’t allow you to put your best self forward and shine. An effective way to get over this is to stop focusing on what might go wrong. As soon as a worrying thought pops into your head, let it go. Realise that it is just that – a thought or a mental event that will pass just like many others did. This technique is based on mindfulness, which has been shown to lower anxiety in study after study.

Another thing you can do when you’re feeling stressed or anxious is to take a few minutes and simply focus on your breathing. If thoughts come into your head as you’re doing this, don’t follow them – let them go and bring your mind gently back to your breaths. This meditative technique will relax you and make you feel calmer.

Face your fears

One of the best ways of getting over your anxiety is through repeated exposure to circumstances that scare you – and this doesn’t apply to just dating. Repeated exposure to situations or people that make you feel anxious eventually lessens your fear response and makes you realise that you really are more resilient than you thought you were.

When it comes to social interactions – or any other phobias for that matter – graded exposure is an effective way of getting over those nerves: start small with mildly feared situations and build your way up to more strongly feared circumstances. For example, next time you go to a social event, practice making small talk for a short period of time or make it a point to voice a comment during a group interaction. Next time, practice making small talk for a longer time and with more people. This will retrain your mind to stop seeing social situations as scary and will give you greater control when around others.

Don’t replay conversations in your head

You’ve got that “I just met someone” feeling and you can’t help but replay the conversation you’ve just had over in your head. Studies have shown that rumination – or constantly going over situations or conversations in your mind (especially those you’re uncertain of) – will only increase your anxiety. If there is an issue that needs to be dealt with, focus on fixing it or doing something about it – but without reacting to it. This is called problem-focused coping. According to research studies, people who do this have better mental health, tend to feel more positive and have more positive outcomes in life than those who use emotion-focused coping. For example, if someone does something that bothers you, tell this person, but don’t ruminate or think about it afterwards.

Are they worth it?

Many self-help books talk about what you should do in order to keep someone attracted. But that seems to be totally the wrong way of going about it. He or she may well be attractive and funny – and know just what to say to keep you hooked – but is that enough? Instead of worrying about how you look to the other person or being self-critical, try to find out more about him/her and whether this person is really worth sticking around for. Maybe you’ll discover that this cutie has a lying streak, is unreliable, or says things that he/she doesn’t mean. Is such a person really worth a relationship? Because the only thing worse than being in a bad relationship for a year, is being in a bad relationship for a year and a day.

The first maritime archaeology expedition mapping ancient submerged landscapes to take place in the Black Sea has led to the discovery of more than 40 shipwrecks associated with the Ottoman and Byzantine Empires. Vivid descriptions of these ships can be found in historical records, but some of them had never been seen before.

"We're endeavouring to answer some hotly-debated questions about when the water level rose, how rapidly it did so and what effects it had on human populations living along this stretch of the Bulgarian coast of the Black Sea," explains principle investigator Professor Jon Adams.

"As such, the primary focus of this project is to carry out geophysical surveys to detect former land surfaces buried below the current sea bed, take core samples and characterise and date them, and create a palaeo-environmental reconstruction of Black Sea prehistory."

On board an offshore vessel called the Stril Explorer, the team is equipped with some of the most advanced technologies in the world for underwater archaeology. They are surveying the sea bed using two sophisticated Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) – one of which has set new records for both depth (1,800m) and sustained speed (over 6 knots). And what they have found has exceeded their expectations.

During the surveys, the scientists have come across a rare and remarkable 'collection' of more than 40 shipwreck at depths below 150 metres – including remains of ships known from historical sources, but never seen before.

Analysing their structure and shape, they have linked some of these mysterious ships to the Ottoman and Byzantine Empires. More research will now be conducted to understand exactly when these wrecks occurred and which period they date back to. This discovery also shines a light on the connections that existed between the communities around the Black Sea many years ago.

"The wrecks are a complete bonus, but a fascinating discovery, found during the course of our extensive geophysical surveys. They are astonishingly preserved due to the anoxic conditions – absence of oxygen – of the Black Sea below 150 metres. Using the latest 3D recording technique for underwater structures, we've been able to capture some astonishing images without disturbing the sea bed. We are now among the very best exponents of this practice methodology and certainly no-one has achieved models of this completeness on shipwrecks at these depths", concluded Adams.

"We're moving from a mobile first to an AI-first world." That was how Google's boss, Sundar Pichai, began a presentation on Tuesday, at which his company unveiled a range of new hardware products.

He believes that the key attraction of both the new Pixel smartphones and the Google Home smart speaker is the company's expertise in artificial intelligence as demonstrated by the Google Assistant.

The search company believes that the vast amount of data it has collected over the years, coupled with its expertise in machine learning, will give it a head start in the coming AI battle.

The company hopes that Google Assistant, a conversational chatbot or virtual PA, will soon be a key feature on all sorts of Android devices, not just those it makes itself.

If Mr Pichai has his way, we will soon be shouting: "OK Google," to get all sorts of information and services.

But on Thursday came news that showed that the biggest player on Android may not be so keen on that idea.

Samsung has announced that it is buying Viv, an artificial intelligence company started by the same people who created the virtual assistant Siri, and then sold it to Apple.

Viv, according to Samsung, is "a unique, open artificial intelligence platform that gives third-party developers the power to use and build conversational assistants and integrate a natural language-based interface into renowned applications and services".

That appears to be a pretty good description of what Google is doing with its AI.

But it sounds as though Samsung may decide that Viv will be a key differentiator on its Galaxy phones - and vast range of household appliances - as it battles to retain its position at the top end of the Android market in competition with the Google Pixel.

And other technology giants are flexing their own AI muscles.

Apple of course has Siri, Microsoft has Cortana, and IBM's Watson has been around for a while and is beginning to make its presence felt in a number of commercial applications.

As she speaks, Madeleine Lancaster rests her hand on her pregnant belly. “Oh they’re about six or seven months along now”. At this point her progeny measure about four millimetres across. She’s growing a few hundred, and each has around two million neurons already.

Fortunately, she’s not talking about an enormous brood of unborn babies – though she is expecting one normal human. No, this scientist is referring to a batch of developing human brains.

We’re in the MRC’s brand new molecular biology lab in Cambridge – a sprawling warren of glass-fronted laboratories, space-age equipment and hallways which seem to stretch for miles. It’s not secret or underground, but the £212m building is home to a number of futuristic projects worthy of their own Hollywood movie.

In her own small corner of this research utopia, Madeleine’s team is at work on a task so absurd it seems more wizardly than scientific: they’re transforming human skin into brains.

“The brains develop in the same way you would see in an embryo,” says Madeleine. This may be true, but their surroundings are rather different. In place of a womb, the disembodied brains are raised in giant incubators. Without a blood supply they are fed with a nutrient-rich fluid which is refreshed every few days. And, of course, they don’t have an immune system: everything – everything – which comes into contact with them must be disinfected first with alcohol.

When she opens the incubator door – well, I have to admit they don’t look as impressive as I’d imagined: insipid, watery blobs floating in a pool of pale pink liquid. They look more like bits of waterlogged popcorn than powerhouses of intellectual ability.

But their looks are deceiving. In fact these “cerebral organoids”, as they have been christened, are strikingly similar to the brains of ordinary people. Just like any other brain, the organoids are divided into grey matter – which is made of neurons – and white matter, a fatty tissue composed of their spindly ‘tails’.

And just like regular brains, each is composed of specific regions. There’s the wrinkled cortex (thought to be the seat of language and conscious thought) the hippocampus (the centre of emotion and memory), the ancient, muscle-coordinating cerebellum, and many, many others. In all, they are equivalent to the brains of nine-week-old foetuses.

So how are they made?

In fact, making a brain isn’t as difficult as you might expect. With a few simple ingredients – and an unquenchable enthusiasm for drenching things in alcohol – you too could have a miniature brain in a matter of months.

First off, you’ll need some cells. Lancaster’s team took theirs from samples of donated skin but, somewhat disconcertingly, to make this masterpiece of human evolution you could start with any cell type – be it nose, liver, or toenail.

Only stem cells are able to develop into all the body’s tissues, so next you’ll need to turn your cells into some of those. For this, the team used a kind of cellular youth serum, a protein cocktail which can rewind the clock and turn any cell back into an embryonic-like state.

After about a week of growth, you should end up with a sheet of cells which can be scraped off the petri dish and moulded into a ball.

Lancaster takes out what looks like an empty dish of pink liquid. “You can see them in there – they are tiny at this point,” she says. Sure enough, each well contains a white dot about the size of a comma. “They kind of want to become an embryo,” she says. (Watch the video below to see more.)

Eventually each stem cell will begin to specialise, turning the uniform balls into a jumble of different cell types. Among them will be brain cells.

To begin with, the researchers are doting parents, keeping their embryos fed and encouraging them to continue to grow. But they aren’t spoilt for long. Next the balls of cells are transferred to a new dish, this time with very little food. As the cells begin to starve, most of them will die off, leaving only the brain cells behind. “They are really robust – I don’t think anyone knows why,” she says.

Finally, the developing brains are enveloped in a blanket of jelly. “It’s the opposite of normal jelly – it starts off as a liquid which you pour on and it jellifies as it warms up in the incubator,” she says. The jelly mimics the tissue a brain would normally be surrounded with in an embryo – like a makeshift skull – and encourages them to develop relatively normally.

Then all you have to do is sit back and wait. Three months later, the finished product is about four millimetres across and contains around two million neurons. “A fully developed, adult mouse brain only contains four million, so you can do a lot with that number,” she says.

The brains are constantly buzzing with electrical activity as neurons zap off signals to one another – though Lancaster says this isn’t much of an achievement on her part. “It’s not very special but it does tell us that we are making functional neurons and that they are acting like neurons,” she says.

She compares it to the heart cells which scientists coaxed to beat inside a petri dish back in 2013; while heart cells are programmed to “want” to pump, neurons “want” to fire. “Even if you have a neuron by itself in a dish with no other neurons, it wants to fire so badly that it will connect to itself in order to fire,” she says.

At the moment, Lancaster’s brains aren’t thought to be able to think. Nobody understands how the activity of our brains gives rise to thoughts – and it’s surprisingly difficult to define what a thought actually is – but it might go something like this. Usually, when we’re exposed to stimulation from the outside world – smells, sounds, ideas – our brains store the information by strengthening the connections between our neurons or forming new ones. The average adult will have as many as 1,000 trillion, which together give our brains an equivalent processing power to a one trillion-bit-per-second computer.

And here’s the rub. Even with all the same components as regular brains, without a body to provide information about the world around them, the brains simply can’t develop normally. “The neurons are working but they aren’t really organised relative to one another,” she says.

Lancaster gives the example of people who are born blind. “Since they aren’t exposed to light, the part of the brain that [these signals] would normally connect up is actually not going to form,” she says.

If you hooked lab-grown brains up to an EEG, you probably wouldn’t see anything. The so-called “brain waves” which the machines can detect occur as a result of millions of neurons firing in synchrony; when combined, their electrical signals are detectable through the scalp.

“This is kind of a good thing, I think. I’d have some issues if I thought there was proper network formation there,” she says.

But making conscious brains was never part of the plan. Instead, Lancaster is using hers to answer a decades-old mystery: for all our intellectual superiority, the genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees is around 1.2%. That’s only 12 times higher than the differences between individual humans (0.1%). Why?

To find out, the team has been taking individual genes involved in brain development and replacing them with the chimpanzee version – then using these cells to make hybrid chimp-human brains. As they develop, the role of the gene often becomes clear; the brains with the chimpanzee gene may be significantly smaller than ordinary human brains, or contain fewer neurons, for example.

In other words, the brains allow researchers to do experiments they would normally never be allowed to do (imagine the controversy if a chimpanzee gene was added to an actual human).

Eventually, Lancaster hopes to do the opposite version of the experiments with lab-grown chimpanzee brains, too. This is tricky, because they are a protected species – you can’t just walk up to a chimpanzee and take a piece of skin – but they’ve found an alternative, if fairly unglamorous, supply of cells. “If an animal has a baby in a zoo, they would normally just throw away the placenta, but we can take these leftovers,” she says.

Elsewhere, the organoids are being used to study uniquely human diseases, from autism to schizophrenia. Historically, it was difficult to study their causes in the lab because – by their very definition – no other animal can get them.

Take autism. Severely autistic children aren’t able to speak – how can you study this disorder in a mouse if it was never able to speak in the first place?

By comparing brains grown from the skin of normal adults and autistic patients, last year scientists were able to show that the disease may be caused by an imbalance of the two main types of neuron, those which initiate signals (excitatory neurons), and those which act as a brake (inhibitory neurons).

“In a normal brain there’s a very fine balance between those two types, so you could imagine this could have a big impact on the way the networks function,” says Lancaster.

The real breakthrough is that not only can the brains simulate these disorders, but they allow scientists to go back in time and work out why the autistic brains are different. “You can watch them over time and find out at what point during their development they start to look different. Well of course you can’t normally do that,” she says.

The man-made brains are already transforming our understanding of the brain, its disorders and what makes humans special. Though they were only invented in 2013, a quick Google search of “cerebral organoids” turns up 2,820 scientific papers already.

So what does the future hold? Several groups are working on improving the brains, introducing a blood supply so that they can grow larger; at the moment, the 4mm brains are entirely reliant on Oxygen and nutrients diffusing in from the surrounding liquid.

For many scientists, the ultimate goal is for the brains to function like normal brains – forming networks which can be stained, sliced up and studied like the brains of lab mice. But for now, the organoids are as inert as the bits of popcorn they resemble.

It is fast approaching lunchtime in Shanghai, and Li Huanhuan is getting hungry. But instead of leaving her office and walking to the nearest food mall to grab a bite, Li, a copywriter, picks up her mobile phone and orders her meal using Ele.me, a food delivery app.

So far, so normal. In many other countries around the globe, on-demand delivery – especially for food – is standard. And, now there’s a seemingly limitless array of delivery apps catering to demanding consumers’ every need, from room sharing to ride sharing. But consumers in China, and the apps that serve them, have taken this concept to a whole new level.

Sure, if Li is running late for an appointment and needs a taxi, she calls one using the app Didi Chuxing, China’s answer to Uber. But if she needs a masseuse, hotel chef in her home, or even a live-in nanny? No problem, she – like many other Chinese – just needs to turn to her phone. There's a proliferation of on-demand services available at her fingertips.

Demand for these apps in China is much higher than in the West, thanks to a growing tech-savvy middle class and heavy discounting by online retailers and service providers. The number of people who can be reached by a single Chinese app is also on another level entirely. According to a report by the official China Internet Network Information Center, China had 688 million internet users at the end of June last year, up 18.9 million from the end of 2014. Among those users, almost nine out of ten use smartphones to get online, the Center says.

“At the core of the industry’s success is its ability to provide efficiency and convenience for the consumer,” says Mark Zhang, chief executive officer and founder of Ele.me, one of China’s largest food delivery apps. It started eight years ago as an online food delivery service for Shanghai university students seeking quick and easy meals, and now has 70 million users and handles five million food orders daily.

Heavy product subsidies, smartphone proliferation and advanced and easy, secure mobile payments have helped the industry’s rapid growth. Many of these apps allow for payments using popular messaging app WeChat or Alipay, China’s version of PayPal.

Labour and logistics costs are also lower in China than in other developed markets, making it much less costly to provide such on-demand services, says Wan Yuchen, a Shanghai-based analyst in China Market Research Group. This helps keep prices low and competitive with brick-and-mortar offerings, she says. For example, food delivery services in China often run promotions that offer free delivery, and the average cost of standard delivery is usually about $1.

In the early years of China’s O2O development, food-delivery, retail and ride-hailing firms led the charge, as they are doing in other markets like Europe and the US. But now, more and more Chinese are demanding lifestyle services such as catering, entertainment, beauty, parenting, travel and weddings. And there are plenty of apps rising to the challenge.

“Such services are a necessity in China and demand is inelastic,” says Wan Yong, the chief executive officer of Ayibang, an app that helps provide housekeepers, nannies and movers on demand. “The pace of life in the big cities will only quicken, and Chinese consumers aren’t going to have the time to search for their housekeepers on their own, and will rely increasingly on such one-stop apps.”

Job creator

Wan says the on-demand sector for lifestyle services in China is just starting to come of age, and is set to take off in a big way over the next two years as Chinese customers get wealthier and as companies refine their product offerings. Ayibang, which began in August 2013 matching housekeepers with clients in Beijing, has now expanded to more than 30 cities across China, and now provides nanny, furniture and home repair services as well.

And it’s not just consumers benefiting. Small business owners and the self-employed are also profiting from widened access to consumers. Ye Xiaorong, a 43-year-old housekeeper in Beijing, says signing up with Ayibang in March has helped link her to many new customers and increased demand for her services.

“In the past, I never had a fixed job or income,” says Ye, who had previously been earning money offering illegal electric scooter taxi rides outside subway stations for as little as 5 yuan ($0.75). Now, she gets a text every morning telling her the daily schedule and she works at least seven hours a day.

“I really like my job now. This gives me a sense of responsibility and a regular income,” she says.

As Chinese smartphone adoption grows, their consumption habits are shifting accordingly to embrace this trend.

On-demand apps have changed the way her generation is shopping or buying things, says Shanghai copywriter Li Huanhuan.

“If my mum were hungry or want to buy new clothing, she might walk to an eatery nearby to buy food or a mall to shop,” Li explained. “Me? I will just do everything on my phone.”

We will happily be having sex with robots soon, according to scientists.

The "sexbots" could be better than humans in bed and we could be looking at human-robot marriages by the year 2050, experts have claimed. Popularity of the machines has been rising as their realism continues to improve and soon could replace human companionship altogether.

Joel Snell, an expert in robots from Kirkwood College in Iowa, said the machines could be programmed to each individual person’s requirements.

“Because they would be programmable, sexbots would meet each individual user’s needs,” Mr Snell told the Daily Star.

“Robotic sex may become addictive. Sexbots would always be available and could never say no, so addictions would be easy to feed,” he said.

According to an academic paper put forward by Ian Yeoman and Michelle Mars, by the year 2050, we should expect Amsterdam’s red light district to be all robots.

In their paper, Robots, men and sex tourism, Mr Yeoman and Ms Mars said: “In 2050, Amsterdam’s red light district will all be about android prostitutes who are clean of sexual transmitted infections (STIs).

“The city council will have direct control over android sex workers controlling prices, hours of operations and sexual services.”

Humans have been warned to be careful when using the robots as it could lead to isolation.

“One of the first impacts of something like sex robots would be to increase human isolation because once you try to tell people that they don't need other human beings any more, one of the consequences of that is more isolation,” Dr Kathleen Richardson, a senior research fellow in the ethics of robotics at De Montfort University, told Sky News.